ISR News Story

Honda's Tetsuaki Nakano, Kensuke Iwanaga give final presentations

Kensuke Iwanaga (L) and Tetsuaki Nakano

Two ISR visiting research scientists from Honda R&D co., Ltd., Japan, gave their final project seminars on July 21 and 23.

Tetsuaki Nakano is a senior engineer in Honda R&D's research division of advanced power plant, and is engaged in research and development of electronic devices that are used for gasoline/diesel engines, controller design of engine and combustion. He spoke on "Hardware and Algorithm Development for Control of Bipedal Locomotion," a project he worked on with Professor P.S. Krishnaprasad (ECE/ISR) in the Intelligent Servosystems Laboratory.

Nakano's research focused on the control of legged locomotion. He assembled the experimental setup with a commercially available humanoid robot platform connected to a Matlab/Simulink based controller. The main focus of the algorithm development was the procedure for designing virtual constraints for the legged robot with time-independent control that has a potential to improve the walking robustness against external disturbances. The virtual constraint design was based on Linear Inverted Pendulum mode that provides simple orbital energy calculation. Nakano also gave a brief introduction of the concept of energy based control.

Kensuke Iwanaga is an engineer in Honda R&D's Automotive R&D Center. He spoke on "The Device Modeling and Characterization of 4H-SiC npn Power Bipolar Junction Transistor," a project he worked on with ISR-affiliated Professor Neil Goldsman (ECE).

Iwanaga's research involved the 4H-SiC bipolar junction transistor (BJT), a fundamental device to satisfy the extremely higher power density requirements for new electric power circuits including inverters and DC/DC converters. The purpose of Iwanaga's research was to model and characterize the transistor Suppressed Surface Recombination structure (SSR)-BJT using a unique 4H-SiC device simulator, and then confirm the dynamic characteristics using device modeling. The static characteristics of the device data for forward current-voltages (I-V) match simulation data. In addition, other static characteristics were confirmed as well including: current gain, on-resistance, thermal dependence, and blocking voltage. After performing the analysis of the static characteristics, he plans to investigate and characterize the dynamic characteristics using the large size device modeling.